Abstract
Hybrid structure of graphene sheets supported by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) sustains unique properties of both graphene and CNTs, which enables the utilization of advantages of the two novel materials. In this work, the capability of three-dimensional pillared graphene structure used as nanomechanical sensors is investigated by performing molecular dynamics simulations. The obtained results demonstrate that: (a) the mass sensitivity of the pillared graphene structure is ultrahigh and can reach at least 1 yg (10−24 g) with a mass responsivity 0.34 GHz · yg−1; (b) the sizes of pillared graphene structure, particularly the distance between carbon nanotube pillars, have a significant effect on the sensing performance; (c) an analytical expression can be derived to detect the deposited mass from the resonant frequency of the pillared graphene structure. The performed analyses might be significant to future design and application of pillared graphene based sensors with high sensitivity and large detecting area.
Highlights
Advances in micro- and nano-materials synthesis have significantly motivated the development of a variety of new nano-technologies, including nanoelectrochemical systems[1], resonance based nanosensors[2,3,4,5,6,7], and nanoactuators[8]
Based on the above two assumptions, we provide the details of investigating the resonant frequency of vertically aligned CNTs (VACNT)-graphene structure
A VACNT-graphene structure consists of two graphene sheets and four carbon nanotubes (CNTs) pillars was used to investigate the effects of attached mass location on the mass sensitivity of the structure
Summary
According to the research work of Matsumoto and Saito, varies of shapes may formed with the graphene sheets and vertically aligned carbon nanotubes[33]. The size of graphene sheets and the length of carbon nanotubes can be altered to construct a specified dimensions system To differentiate these systems that have different dimensions, the term “PHhPDd” was utilized in this study, where “PHh” denotes the height of tubes (h), and “PDd” represents the distance (d) between vertically aligned nanotubes[30]. All of the performed molecular dynamics simulations were carried out by the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) package[44], while the OVITO package was utilized for visualization[45]
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